By Zachary Oren Smith Monday, July 27, 2015 1:32 p.m. CDT
In the summer of 2012, Andrew Campbell took a bus up to South Dakota. He was going to spend the summer interning with an organic farm that raised crops for cooperatives and farmers markets. Before that summer, Campbell knew only one kind of tomato: red and roughly the size of your fist.
Read MoreFeaturing Kali Akuno
As part of the Climate Convergence, REC helped host "The U.S. Left and the Problem of the State," a panel with Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, journalist and author Christian Parenti, historian Frances Fox Piven, organizer Kali Akuno, and REC Executive Director Marcie Smith. The panel, which was held at 16 Beaver Street, discussed the role of the state in addressing the climate crisis.
We appreciate The Clarion-Ledger and Mayor Tony Yarber including Cooperation Jackson in this latest promotion of the great city of Jackson, Mississippi.
By Adofo Minka
El-Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) once said that travel helps to broaden one’s scope. I never exactly understood what he meant by that and this is likely attributable to the fact that until now, I had never traveled outside of the United States. Being a part of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance’s (GGJ) delegation to the World Social Forum has changed that reality and has helped me to understand, more than I did before, the importance of international travel and engaging with other people throughout the globe to grasp a better understanding of where the work you do fit into the world picture. Being a part of this delegation has shown me the difference in reading about various struggles globally and having the opportunity to actually meet, talk to, and strategize with various people who are engaged in these struggles. The difference is that you actually get to learn about the nuances, complexities, and challenges that people face in their struggles against various forms of oppression in a way that in many instances reading will not reveal to you.
Read MorePosted on March 18, 2015
By Dara Cooper, Contributing Editor, Environment, Food, and Sustainability
Just over a year ago last February 2014, the world lost an incredible activist, organizer, father, and mentor—Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba who came to be known as “America’s revolutionary mayor”—due to a very sudden death. Although we gained Baba Chokwe as an ancestor, after only seven months in office, the loss of Mayor Lumumba came as a sudden blow to activists, dreamers and loved ones all over the country. The significance of his revolutionary work, and most notably his term in office, was and will be forever remembered. With scant resources, a radical agenda and revolutionary heart, his candidacy appeared to be a tremendous long shot to most. A strong grassroots strategy that mobilized the masses proved that the power of the people is more than an ideology. The election of Mayor Lumumba was a real life example of the true power of democratic processes and the viability of a radical agenda.
Read MoreKali Akuno - February 2015
By Kali Akuno. “As the South Goes…So Goes the Nation.”
W.E.B Du Bois wrote these famous words in Black Reconstruction, linking America’s promise of democracy to the horrendous conditions for Black people in the South. Sadly, the State of Mississippi has long been a bellwether in this regard, from slavery and lynchings to Jim Crow, segregation, and ongoing voter disenfranchisement. Today, Mississippi has both the country’s largest Black population by percentage and its highest poverty rate. This is a not a coincidence but an illustration of how economic inequality goes hand in hand with racial discrimination.
Read MoreIn this article, Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson ask critical questions like what is the root cause of racism and national oppression in the U.S.? What are the underlying reasons for the fact that Black people remain at the bottom of the U.S. economy? What are African-American organizations and communities doing to resist the persistence of institutional racism and structural inequality? What are we doing to combat advancing structural exclusion from the formal economy, which is intensifying our dehumanization making large sectors of our people disposable? And what is the direction forward?
Read MoreIn Jackson, Mississippi, Kali Akuno expected to help develop worker cooperatives alongside that city’s new mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, who won office in 2013. But Lumumba died of a heart attack Feb. 25, a few months into his term.
Now supporters are wondering what will happen to their plan to construct a network of co-ops that would create jobs and overcome the city’s entrenched poverty, particularly among its black majority. Akuno, Lumumba’s former coordinator of special projects and external funding, was tasked in 2013 with creating a cooperative-development fund that would rely on city grants and private sources, with the goal of creating several new organizations and hundreds of jobs.
Read More2014 was a critical year for the Climate Justice Movement, which is arguably the most important social justice movement of our time. In the minds of many 2014 will be duly noted as the year when the movement transformed from being a resistance movement focused on altering the policies and practices of the national states and trans-national corporations, to one that is beginning to focus on system change and a just transition from the extractive economy.
Read Moreby Jessica Desvarieux - The Real News Network December 7th 2014
Activist Kali Akuno and historian Paul Le Blanc link judicial injustice to economic inequality
by Jessica Desvarieux - The Real News Network December 8th 2014
Activist Kali Akuno and historian Paul Le Blanc discuss the abandoned Freedom Budget of the Civil Civil Rights Movement and how it could be revived to address race and class disparities.
Jackson, Miss.: Not exactly the eco-capital of the world. The city’s wastewater disposal has the attention of the EPA, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is a big fracking supporter, there’s no glass recycling within city limits … and so on. But longtime organizer Kali Akuno has a vision: He and 100-plus volunteers want to turn the hardscrabble city of roughly 170,000 into a marvel of sustainability and social justice.
Read MoreThe "People's Summit on Climate Change" is hosted by grassroots organizations and networks—including the Workers General Confederation of Peru, Andean Coordinator of Indigenous organizations, and Workers Autonomous Central of Peru.
It constitutes an alternative to the ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also in Lima, where government representatives and corporate leaders are holding the latest in a series of UN talks.
"We, the social movements and the progressive forces of civil society are beginning to seriously prepare ourselves for the protracted struggle to defend the people and the planet and create a just transition from the extractive and exploitative economy to a democratic economy that aligns us with the natural processes of the earth," Kali Akuno, from the Mississippi-based organization Cooperation Jackson, told Common Dreams from Lima.
Read MoreIn the aftermath of a string of extrajudicial killings, including Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, advocates in Jackson want to charter a commission to protect and facilitate more equitable social relations.
A partnership between the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson, which emphasizes cooperatives, the campaign's organizers want to continue the vision of late Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba. When Lumumba was a city councilman, he introduced a human rights proclamation and successfully pushed for an anti-racial profiling ordinance. As mayor, Lumumba wanted to implement a human-rights commission, but he died eight months into his term.
Read MoreNine months after Chokwe Lumumba's death while serving as Jackson mayor, a community center has opened and been named in his honor. Cooperation Jackson, an organization formed after Lumumba's death to promote the late mayor's vision of a grassroots solidarity economy, purchased the building at 939 West Capitol St. that formerly housed a daycare center.
Last night, the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development opened to the public with its first public event: a town hall meeting about protests in Ferguson, Mo., sparked by the police killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown in August.
Read MoreCHECK OUT GOPAL DAYANENI AND CINDY WIESNER DISCUSSING THE FUTURE FOR THE CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT AFTER THE PEOPLE'S CLIMATE JUSTICE MARCH WITH LAURA FLANDERS.
COOPERATION JACKSON IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE CLIMATE JUSTICE ALLIANCE AND THE OUR POWER CAMPAIGN.
COOPERATION JACKSON AT THE PEOPLES CLIMATE MARCH SEPTEMBER 21ST 2014
Some 2,000 demonstrations were staged in 150 countries on Sunday, including in major cities such as London, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, and Bogotá.
At the outset of the march in New York City, organizers said the crowd stretched along Central Park West from 60th Street all the way to 93rd Street. People gathered in groups, including those designated for young people, physicians, Native Americans, scientists, domestic workers, immigrants and religious groups.
“It’s stupendous. I’m 60 and I haven’t seen anything like this since the March on Washington,” said Iya’Falola Omobola, a community activist from Jackson, Mississippi. She attended the historic civil rights march as a child in 1963.
Read MoreZein Nakhoda of the Maypop Collective for Climate and Economic Justice interviews members of Cooperation Jackson, Brandon King, Mr. D-Meezy, Vernon Young and Addie Green of the NAACP, about how their work intersects with climate justice and the role of building alternative institutions. Listen to the interview here:
Read MoreBuilding a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi anchored by a network of cooperatives and other worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.
